I, like Digby, am amazed that this article hasn't gotten more play.

When you're registered to vote, your place of residence is part of your registration. That tells the system what district you live in, etc.

However, when you're a beleaguered family in foreclosure whose house is gone and now you're living in an apartment across a county line, or with your mother in the next state, or something, probably updating your voter registration isn't the first thing on your mind.

These circumstances, in addition to the new, more stringent voter ID laws coming into effect in some states (Indiana the most recent and most prominent)--that is to say, what kind of identification you have to have on you in order to be allowed to vote--set us up for a whole lotta disenfranchised voters. Ballots will not be counted, votes will not be allowed, special ballots will get clogged in the system, and there will be mass chaos.

Note that these issues are particularly paramount in swing states. Economically (foreclosures), that's an unfortuate coincidence. Legally (voter ID laws), it smells pretty fishy to me. (Not to mention that voter ID laws disproportionately affect the poor, the less educated, people of color, etc.)

This is also part of the same meme as the right wingers trying to say that Obama's popularity makes him a fascist. Basically, since nobody wants to vote for the Republicans, they're trying to a) keep people from voting and b) imply that having people want to vote for you makes you Hitler (who is foreign, just like that black-Muslim-African-tooEuropean-latte-sipper of a Democrat), so vote reluctantly for the other (white, familiar, unfascistly unpopular--he's a Maverick, remember?) guy and be a Real American (TM) .

Banking panic

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/business/15bank.html?th&emc=th

Okay, the above is an article in the NYT about the ripples coming from all the worry about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I'm not going to do a long analysis or anything because really there's nothing for me to analyze (maybe there would be if I knew more about financial markets). I'm posting it because I think it's important that people understand what's going on in the world around them, and please believe me when I say this is in fact important for everyone to know.

We live in an economic system. Failure to understand what's going on in times of economic trouble is just dumb.


Basically, what's up is that Fannie and Freddie, as I wrote a while ago, are looking shaky. The government is bailing them out, but all the nerves, as well as some bleak quarterly returns for a number of smaller and regional banks, are having a nasty effect. The government had to seize IndyMac, a CA bank, today as it turned out to be insolvent. Consumers are getting very nervous, though there have been no bank runs yet (unless you count Wall Street, where investors have been getting out of bank stocks awful fast). A lot of experts are definitely freaking. Comparisons to the Depression are definitely being bruited about, despite the fact that the SEC (Securities and Exchange Comission) has threatened to "crack down" (whatever that means) on traders who spread false rumors.


In other news, the arrest of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan has been formally requested by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

This is particularly noteworthy because it's the first time the prosecutor of the ICC has brought genocide charges. Against anyone. Also the first time bringing charges against a head of state (other heads of state like Milosevic were tried by other interanational entities). What's also interesting will be to see how the various factions in the civil war handle this--one already has said it will never negotiate with the government because it won't negotiate with war criminals. I can see good outcomes--he (allegedly) started it, after all, and instating a government committed to ending the war could only be good--but I can see bad ones too. Increased chaos, loyalists refusing to talk, opposition refusing to talk because they see it as an opportunity to keep doing what they're doing.

And for a totally mindboggling fact: The ICC has already issued arrest warrants for two people high up in the Sudanese government. Not only did al-Bashir scoff at the warrants, he promoted one of the men to minister of humanitarian affairs. Talk about a macabre fucking sense of humor.

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2008/07/stay-classy-dubya.html

HOW IS THIS MAN OUR PRESIDENT?!


I just--I can't--it's not just that he's stupid. He's socially inept and the man has NO FUCKING MANNERS. Maybe that's why we don't even try diplomacy anymore.

Maybe he's actually an actor from SNL or Second City and this whole thing has been satire. Maybe? Please?


Also, the fact that I just wrote "it's not just that he's stupid" is really really mindbogglingly symptomatic of how pathetic this situation is.

[If you don't feel like clicking through, we just had a G8 summit in Japan. Emissions control was discussed. The US was generous enough to say that it would "consider" halving emissions by the twelfth of never. And at the final meeting, as Bush was signing off, what does he say? "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter!" I DON'T EVEN KNOW ANYMORE.]


In other news, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two biggest mortgage lending companies in the nation, are looking pretty precarious financially. I won't go into all the details, but if either one failed, let alone both, the national housing market would come to a near-standstill, losses would be declared pretty much all over the world (the two banks were always secure enough that pretty much the whole world has stakes in them--big ones), and the credit crisis (which makes it hard to get student loans, housing loans, or any other kind of credit) would get another bump. Even a bit more instability would raise interest rates on pretty much all mortgages (because even mortgages not actually tied to the two banks are tied to banks that loan to them or that get loans from them, and the interest rates go back to the interest banks charge each other).

The government is considering putting them in conservation, which basically means that if they can't guarantee all the debt they launder, taxpayers have to. That sounds really fucking shitty (helloooo, deficit), but the alternative is worse: no bailout, or the government bailing the situation out further down the line for even more money (a few trillion dollars that taxpayers would still be responsible for). And just to be clear, no bailout = economic and housing disaster of epic proportions.


On a COMPLETELY UNRELATED note (cough cough), John McCain plans to continue the Bush tax cuts, add more tax cuts, expand the Pentagon's budget, keep both wars going (Iraq and Afghanistan) and, judging by his propensity to joke about dead Iranians, probably start fucking with Iran--but don't worry! He'll balance the budget by 2013! He'll have to do it by balancing a checkbook, though, because he doesn't know how to use a computer. (No, really. He said so.) Maybe a whiteboard? Or an abacus! That would look really presidential in the Oval Office, don't you think?